White House Seeks to Avoid Another Lost Year

President Barack Obama, flanked by Vice President Joe Biden and House Speaker John Boehner, delivers his 2013 State of the Union address. The White House hopes the 2014 address will reboot what has been a lethargic and relatively unproductive start to a second term.

Associated Press

The countdown is on to President Barack Obama‘s fifth State of the Union address next Tuesday. The White House is still finalizing the policy proposals the address will include, following weeks of soliciting ideas. Look for income inequality, energy, climate change, college affordability and early childhood education as highlights.

But the State of the Union address is about more than just the speech. For a sitting president, it’s essentially a fresh start. And, more than any time in his presidency, Mr. Obama needs one of those. The year 2013 was a mostly empty year, with little to no movement on the White House’s legislative agenda (The president has rushed in recent weeks to make good on promises from last year’s State of the Union address). The year was capped by a botched rollout of Mr. Obama’s signature health care law, a self-inflicted wound that handed Republicans a political cudgel.

And he’s got just three years left.

In that sense, the White House hopes the speech, which will draw the largest audience Mr. Obama is likely to command all year, will reboot what has been a lethargic and relatively unproductive start to a second term. How Mr. Obama’s aides lay the groundwork for his policy announcements, and the White House’s subsequent follow-through, are critical.

After three years of battles with a divided Congress, one of the key questions Mr. Obama’s aides have wrestled with in packaging next week’s State of the Union address is: How does the president speak to a Congress that’s repeatedly hostile to his agenda?

A video the White House released Tuesday suggests they’ve settled on a strategy. In it, the president’s chief of staff, Denis McDonough, says: “The State of the Union is not just a conversation with Congress, but a conversation with you, the American people.”

The approach is familiar. Since Republicans took control of the House in 2010 and made significant gains in the Senate, Mr. Obama has tried to sell his agenda outside of Washington in attempt to pressure Washington.

With no signs that lawmakers will suddenly warm to his proposals – particularly in an election year – Mr. Obama’s team is poised to employ a similar strategy.

“It’s an opportunity to refocus,” David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s longtime adviser, said in a recent interview.

Mr. Obama indicated in the last week that he’s thinking less about pushing an agenda through Congress than he has in the past five years. He’s got a pen and a phone, he said, and is prepared to sign executive orders and convene business leaders and others to generate policy changes without Congress.

“When it comes to Congress, there is no such thing as an offer they can’t refuse,” Mr. Obama said in an interview with the New Yorker that published this week.

The president needs a strategy shift to make good on his White House’s promise that 2014 will be a “year of action.” Immigration reform is the one major piece of legislation Mr. Obama may accomplish in his second term, and even that is far from guaranteed.

Mr. Obama is staking his broader legacy on issues of economic inequality. The White House video promises Americans an exclusive view of the policies the president puts forward next week with charts, graphics and conversations with administration officials.

Many of the issues in last year’s State of the Union address will be repackaged in 2014, including climate change, tax reform and infrastructure spending.

The video spotlights some of those issues, as well as Social Security, trade, climate change, job training, energy, education and military veterans. (It’s apparently not a preview of the laundry-list of topics in the president’s address).

Mr. McDonough argues that the speech is only the beginning.

Indeed, the president’s aides are scrambling to make sure he doesn’t have another lost year like 2013. There’s a feeling in the West Wing that he can’t really afford that, with just three years left in office. After the midterms, the president’s chances of accomplishing legislative goals further shrink. Mr. Obama could also see his influence wane in terms of the “convening power” the White House has referred to in recent weeks, as the fight to succeed him heats up. Administration officials are acutely aware of the ticking clock.

“My sense is that they’re feeling that there are three years left and that they want to make every day count,” Mr. Axelrod said.

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